Despite the extreme natural disasters that took place in Japan, it knocked out power, backups, and cooling of 2 plants (out of Japan’s 50+). One of the reactors was weeks from being turned off, 40 years old. And it doesn’t look like an even locally threatening amount of radiation will end up in the atmosphere, despite all of that.

The emotional argument will be terrorism in addition to the above.

It’s irrational to fear these things. The threat of economic troubles because of a poorly chosen energy policy that ignores nuclear power is many orders of magnitude higher than any terrorist attack or a ‘perfect storm’ natural disaster of a plant located within the Ring of Fire.

The USA has had an irresponsible policy towards energy for 40 years, contributing to our huge trade imbalance, and am not optimistic that will change. This was a natural disaster with a death toll that will be in the thousands. Yet people will loudly point to the Japan reactor incident that harmed very few, and caused little damage — which took place in the midst of one of the larger natural disasters in history, and feed off of their own ignorance and fear. Disappointing.